Google will understand your search better with the new BERT update

With the popularity of voice search increasing rapidly, it has become more important for Google to understand the user’s intent when they make a search on Google. Sometimes, it happens that the user does not find the keyword that they should use to search for what they are looking for. To make sure the exact result will be displayed, it is the responsibility of Google to understand the users’ intent in a better way.

We have seen that Google is continuously making all the efforts to understand the query of the user in a better way and for that, it has come with several updates. With the new update, Google has somewhere moved ahead in coming closer to detect what the user is trying to ask so that they can provide exactly what the user is asking for it.

Google has now come up with the BERT update, which will help the search engine to better understand the intent of the user and they will get the exact answer for the query that they are looking for on Google.

What Is Google BERT Update?

BERT, the latest and the biggest Google algorithm update stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing, so it is basically a language model that will help Google to understand the context of the search query.

According to Google researchers, “unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from the unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right contexts in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.”

What Is Google BERT Targeting?

BERT update will affect 10% of all queries, as per Google’s own estimates, which means 1 in every 10 searches is going to be affected by this update. The important thing to note here is that it mainly affects the long-term keyword that has articles in it and more than one meaning can be taken out of it. So, some people might not see the effect if they are targeting a small keyword that has an exact meaning.

This is what Google said, “These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results. Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”

Here’s an example for search keyword “2019 brazil traveler to the USA needs a visa.”

Here is one more example, “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy”

How does Google BERT Affect SEO?

SEO means making your website content better for the search engine and therefore any changes that have been made in the algorithm of the search engine will affect the rank of the website. Taking the BERT update into context, the update will allow the search engine to better understand the intent of the query that is being asked by the user. So, it will eliminate the content that does not have the exact answer to the question that is being asked by the user.

As a content writer or content marketer, what you have to focus on is to write content that is solving a problem or giving an answer to a question in a precise way. The best part here is that you don’t have to do anything new, as the famous “content is king” proverb is now more relevant and if you are writing to answer a question asked by the user, this update will benefit you or it can be another way around.